my favorite salad for entertaining

I went to a friend’s house last night for poker and homemade pizza (delicious!).  Well, the boys played poker while the women did some knitting.  So we brought my favorite salad for gatherings: Spinach Salad with Pecans, Goat Cheese, Strawberries, and Honey-mustard Vinaigrette.  It is always a huge hit, and last night was no exception.  It’s actually quite easy, and is sure to impress.  The secret is the goat cheese paired with a tangy honey mustard/balsamic dressing.  Yum!  Check out Simply Recipes for the recipe.  The only change I make is to add sliced fresh strawberries.

Spinach salad with pecans, goat cheese, strawberries, and honey-mustard vinaigrette

I love salad, but I have yet to find a store-bought salad dressing that I like.  You know that salads are always better at restaurants.  But I think the main reason is that they usually have fresh dressing without all those preservatives in the bottled dressings.  It turns out that salad dressing can be really easy to make and makes all the difference in your dinner salads.  This dressing is a great example.

This salad also has candied pecans, which is a great way to set your salad apart from the pack.  They are quite easy to make and are delicious!  Good luck not eating them all in one sitting, though…

Pecans after roasting

baby birds

We have a bunch of plants on our porch (mostly basil this year), and to collect rainwater for them, we set out a Rubbermaid lid on the ground.  Soon our local birds discovered the shallow standing water and flocked to it.  I have never seen birds bathing this much!  They line up for it if they are patient, or chase each other away when they are impatient.  We eventually gave in and bought some bird seed for them so that they can enjoy a bath and a quick bite to eat.

baby (teenage?) bird and papa

The newest members of this porch spa are doves and some adolescent cardinals.  We had one young cardinal hanging out here most of the summer, but now there are at least three of them (I think the other one is older now).  They are really cute and really loud – yesterday I saw one of them standing in the middle of the bird seed, squawking at an adult (his father, I assume).  After a long bout of whining, the young bird got what he wanted.  His dad came over, took the seed from the baby’s mouth, cracked the shell, and gave him the good stuff inside.  It was so cool.  Mostly the young birds just chase each other around and make a lot of noise.  Somehow my greyhound Doc doesn’t seem to care.

young cardinal

long delays at airport = lots of knitting

I just got back from a conference at Princeton.  I have now twice been stuck for hours at the Newark airport, and I will not make this mistake again.  You would think that at least one of the nearly hourly flights from Newark to Atlanta would leave on time, but no.  I was on not one, but two, cancelled flights before landing a spot on the 1 pm flight which eventually took off… at 9pm.  But at least we took off.  We boarded and deplaned three times.  I didn’t really get a chance to do any work, but made some real progress on my new sweater.

This second lace sweater will be knit top down with set-in sleeves and a V-neck leading to buttons down the front.  Of course, I don’t have a pattern, so I’m making it up as I go.  This might require some patience, as last time I did this I ended up ripping out the whole sweater and starting over.  This time, though, I have plenty of yarn, so I am designing the sweater to fit more loosely.  This design should be easier to do the shaping, since I just have 5 strips of lace going down the sweater, rather than an all-over lace pattern.  The shaping will mostly be done in the stockinette-stitch sections.

Early front view

The lace itself comes from my favorite collection of lace patterns, Knitted Lace of Estonia, by Nancy Bush.  It is a pattern commonly called “Double Rose Leaf“.

I started with the front shoulders in two pieces, then the back panel, and have finally joined them together.  The armholes are way too big, but I think I can fix this at the end.  I haven’t decided yet what my sleeves will look like (lace/stockinette stitch? fitted /loose?, etc).  At the end, I will add ribbing around the neckline and down the front of the cardigan.

Pieces joined together

with the shoulders pinned together - huge armholes!

Am I crazy for making a lace cardigan in white?  How long will it be before I spill red wine on this sweater?  My guess is after 3 wears or so, when I stop being careful.  There really should be a correlation between the amount of time it takes to knit a garment and the number of wears; if I spend months on a project I should get many wears out of it!  I guess I should knit this 0ne up really fast, then.

Lace silk cardigan (almost) finished!

Last year, I found this amazing 100% silk yarn in a bargain bin for 50% off.  But there were only two skeins, and I didn’t know what to do with it.  So it has been sitting in my stash for months, waiting for me to pick a project worthy of this beautiful yarn.  I really wanted to make an elegant top for wearing to the symphony or wearing to job interviews, but I could imagine months of knitting going to waste after running out of yarn halfway through.

My solution?  Lace knitting!  Not only is lace beautiful, it is also very economical because so much of the project consists of air, so it doesn’t use very much yarn.  The trouble is, designing an all-over lace sweater is painstakingly difficult.  It is nearly impossible to incorporate the lace pattern into the shaping of the sweater.  As such, I spent a long time looking for a pattern for this kind of sweater, and couldn’t really find any.  So I (being naive and perhaps overly confident), decided to make my own pattern and knit it all up just hoping that I had enough yarn.

My first attempt: too small.  After finishing nearly the entire sweater, I decided it was too small and I couldn’t bear to waste this yarn on a garment that I wouldn’t wear because it didn’t fit.  So I ripped it all out.  Sad face.

I also realized that my lace pattern (which is from Knitted Lace of Estonia, like all of the lace patterns I’ve used) knits up upside down.  That is, if I knit from the bottom-up as I wanted to, the twig pattern would be upside down.  So I decided to try to knit the sweater top-down.  Now, to add to my naivete and over-ambitiousness, I have never knitted anything top-down.  This should have been a red flag for me.  Like, hey, maybe you should practice on another top-down sweater before you go crazy trying to design your own in lace from scratch.  But, no, I battled on, making an individual lace diagram for the Left Front panel, then the Right Front panel, then the Back panel and the sleeves panel.  I should mention that this endeavor is complicated by the fact that with lace knitting, you never really know how big it will be until you block it, as it will stretch out how you like it.  So to determine the number of stitches for each piece is kind of a guessing game.  Hence, I repeatedly made changes to the number of stitches in each section, and each time I changed my mind, I had to draw out all new diagrams for each piece…

I have to admit it.  I failed.  I toiled with this for a long time before I realized that my sanity was at stake, and if I were to ever get real work done again, then I would have to try a different approach.

So I went back to my bottom-up design, which is immensely easier, and which I could design on the fly, without having to map out each individual piece.  And I succeeded!

Twig Lace Cardigan

My Twig Lace Cardi is now almost finished.  I always put off attaching the buttons, so I have a bunch of nearly completed sweaters, which now includes this one.  I have ordered the buttons, and I promised myself that I would put them on when they arrive.  I’ll also get some better pictures then.

Twig Lace Cardigan

Miracle cardigan

I call this my Miracle cardigan because it felt like a miracle when I finally finished it.  Halfway through, I broke my finger and had to have surgery to put it back together.  We can thank my beautiful race-car dog for the broken finger – he goes 0 to 40 mph in 3 strides, and we were already running at a clip when he took off with my finger caught in the leash.  After a few months of physical therapy, it still hurt to knit at all for a while.  Finally, I was able to pick up the needles again, and worked like crazy to finish it before I got sidetracked on a new project.

 

Casablanca

This beautiful sweater is Casablanca, from Annie Modesitt’s Romantic Hand Knits.  This book is kind of a disappointment.  This sweater pattern (which has its own issues – see below) and the super sexy red skirt on the cover are really the only reasons to buy it.  I don’t really care for any of the other patterns, although the lacy brimmed hats (Gone with the Wind) are stunning.  I’m tempted to make one, but really, where would I wear it?

I didn’t like the way this sweater fit at first; it is designed so that the sleeves sit off your shoulders.  In fact, it is designed to be worn somehow without a shirt or bra beneath it.  However, real women wear bras, and so this sweater really needs a tanktop underneath it.  But that means that the sleeves constantly fall down off your shoulders, exposing straps.  It drove me crazy – enough so that I didn’t wear it for a few months.  But then I decided to add this tie to keep the sleeves up, and it works like a dream.  Now I love it.

Bridesmaids’ scarves

With about 2 months left before my wedding, I figured I could probably finish 4 lace gifts, one for each of my bridesmaids, as long as I finished each one in 2 weeks.  I just barely made it.  I decided to make them scarves, in order to get them done in time.  Here are two of them:

Mom’s shawl

After that first lace project, I was hooked.  I decided to knit a shawl for my mom for the wedding.  I chose this Double Rose Leaf pattern, which is just lovely.  It’s my favorite lace pattern to look at, but somewhat annoying to knit.  Still, it is worth the effort.

First lace shawl/ Wedding veil

Shawl/ Wedding veil

This is my favorite knitting project yet.  It was my first lace project, and an ambitious one at that.  I was engaged, and curious about knitted veils.  I had already bought a gorgeous, dramatic, cathedral length veil:

So there was no real reason to make another veil (and in fact, I did not wear this at my wedding, except as a shawl before the ceremony in the bride’s room).  Still, as usual, I wanted to know if I could do it.  Plus, it doubles as an amazing shawl.

I found some other knitters’ handmade wedding veils, and the best construction that I found was a semicircle, with a comb in the middle of the straight edge, so that the veil draped nicely around the shoulders and back.  Actually, the best construction I found was a giant circle, with the comb at one edge of the circle so that the rest of the veil trailed all the way to the ground.  This was knit by an amazing knitter for her granddaughter; you must check out the pictures on her website.  These pictures inspired me #1 to learn how to knit lace, and #2 to attempt a veil.  Stunning.

For my first lace project, I knew that I needed a somewhat simpler construction (otherwise it would have taken me a year to finish!).  So I went with the semicircle.  I used the Twig pattern and the Lilac Leaf pattern from Knitted Lace of Estonia, and combined them with a semicircle construction that I found in Traditional Knitted Lace Shawls.  The idea is that you start at the center with just 6 stitches, increasing 8 stitches every other row to create 4 wedges, which make up your semicircle.  This construction maintains the stitches:radius ratio; notice that the length of the stitches on the needles is in a sense equivalent to the circumference, so the ratio (in terms of inches) should always be 2pi = circumference/radius.  You just need to get the right gauge.

Blocking

 

Doc sweater

Greyhounds are very sensitive to changes in temperature (just like humans).  They get cold really easily, and I can’t bear to see my cute Doc shivering.  So, naturally, I knit him a sweater!  I got this pattern from a greyhound adoption group and knit this version in 2009.

Doc's knit sweater and my wonderful husband about to take him outside.

He’s pretty handsome.  For very cold nights (yes, it gets cold in Atlanta!), I sewed a winter coat for him.  Lined with monkey fleece!

Winter coat with pocket!